Andre Deschodt
Agile Coach
Cape Town, South Africa
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I'm passionate about driving organisational transformation through Agile and Lean principles. As an experienced Agilist, I specialise in evolving teams, culture, and systems into high-performing, collaborative units. My approach centres on continuous improvement and creating flow - whether at work or home, I'm always seeking better ways to optimise and collaborate. A regular speaker at local and global conferences, I enjoy connecting with and learning from the global Agile community.
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Flow, Sim City - How to optimise the flow of value with team structures aligned to value streams
“Our world will change more in the next 10 years than in the last 100 years.”
- Gerd Leonhard, futurist and humanist
This rapid pace of change also affects your customers and how you meet their needs. In the past, customers may have been satisfied with getting a response in a month’s time; today, they expect their needs to be fulfilled in a matter of days. To succeed, it’s critical to set up your organisation in a way that supports this appetite for rapid satisfaction.
The challenge is that customers’ needs and the realisation of benefits are separated by a complex network of human interactions. This complexity hampers the flow of value, information and product development. On a team level, the implementation of concepts such as the Agile Mindset, supported by practices such as Scrum and Kanban is a step in the right direction and can help streamline your teams and improve work delivery. However, if you don’t optimise your organisation at a macro level, the efficiency of workflow across the whole system is unlikely to improve.
In this practical workshop, we will look at two foundational elements that we believe are essential to optimising your organisational flow and increasing value delivery to customers:
1. Value Stream Mapping: We will look at how to use Value Stream Mapping to identify the essence of your products and to align these Value Streams for the best flow.
2. Team Topologies: We will then link these Value Streams to how you structure your team to optimise value generation. To do this, we will play a real-life version of Sim City by building our own city on a large map.
1, 2, 3, Estimate - Manage Expectations with Accuracy
“Give the business what they expect, when they expect it.” - David Cohn (CIO, Shoprite Group)
Managing expectations with accurate predictability is hard and we often fall short in our estimations. In this workshop, we want to create a renewed view on estimation accuracy in delivery and as a result, foster and cement trust from the organisation.
How do we use enlightened trial, error and empirical data produced in the team when estimating? Why should we choose not to follow the plan of a lone genius when estimating and committing on behalf of the team?
In this deep dive, we uncover the lesser-known and less spoken about value of estimations. We will demonstrate how we value:
Mutual understanding over individual specialisation.
Incremental knowledge over full scope analysis and design.
Knowledge sharing over domain specialisation.
Competency cross-pollination over siloed skills.
We believe that with a principle understanding of the more subtle value of estimations and with some practice in our teams we can establish a rhythm and become estimation superheroes. On the estimation journey during the workshop, we identify and uncover the following aspects:
- Current views on estimation in the room
- Estimation in real-life examples
- Certainty over time
- Predictability
- The Value of Estimation
- Relative Estimation Methods
- Estimation anti-patterns
- Estimation exercises
We will take the audience on an exploratory, interactive journey through what we believe to be a practical way of looking at relative estimation. The attendees will leave the workshop with a welcomed and changed perspective on estimation as well as an easy and fun way of explaining estimation within their own teams.
Navigating Team Design and Dynamics with Laser Precision
"Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success." - Henry Ford
Join us at the Team Design and Dynamics Workshop to delve into the heart of high-performing teams. Discover the significance of small, cross-functional teams, explore the dynamics that drive their success, and learn how to set them up for supercharged growth. Through this session, we will equip you with the knowledge and tools to avoid common pitfalls, lead your teams to excellence, and navigate the ever-changing landscape of team dynamics.
We will explore various change models and how they reflect team dynamics and performance. You will learn strategies to shorten and lessen their impact, allowing your teams to adapt more smoothly to the challenges of a dynamic organisational environment.
This workshop will be highly interactive, involving discussions and hands-on activities. By the end of the session, you will leave with a toolkit to design, nurture, and optimize your teams for success while mastering the art of managing change and its impact.
Join us to embark on a journey towards creating teams that don't just work together but truly excel together. Together, we'll turn Henry Ford's words into your team's reality: "Working together is success."
Don't miss this opportunity to enhance your Agile practices, ensure your teams are on the path to greatness, and master the art of change in team dynamics. We look forward to seeing you at the session!
Crafting Resilient, Adaptive Teams with Laser Precision
"The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new." - Socrates
Since 2020, product development timelines have decreased from 12 to 4 months, while annual app releases doubled to 4 million per year. Changing business demands, employee turnover, and shifts in markets and technology have required teams to radically transform their working methods, collaboration practices, and delivery processes to maintain unprecedented speeds. Despite our preference for stable, long-lived teams, adapting team structures more fluidly is often a necessary reality. Join me in breaking down the Dynamic Reteaming pattern and transforming theory into practice - giving you concrete tools to reshape your teams with purpose and precision.
I'll share real examples from personal experiences and case studies from organisations renowned for successful reteaming. You'll discover why Dynamic Reteaming is not just a necessity, but a powerful tool for fostering innovation and driving success.
Through a series of engaging activities and discussions, we’ll delve into:
- The concept of Dynamic Reteaming and its importance in modern organisations
- A fresh perspective on team development that challenges traditional models
- The team eco-cycle: from birth through adolescence and maturity, to creative destruction
- The five key patterns of Dynamic Reteaming and how to leverage them effectively
This workshop goes beyond theory, offering practical tools to implement Dynamic Reteaming in your organisation. You'll leave with a comprehensive understanding of building, adapting, and optimising teams in an ever-changing environment.
Explore fresh approaches to reshape your teams, unlocking the full potential of your organisation’s most valuable asset - its people.
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